Happy Camper and Rising Tide

For a long time, I had wanted to get into my own business. When the opportunity appeared to partner into one at Rising Tide Software, I jumped on it. It was rough. I worked some of the hardest hours I'd ever worked. Running a business is a masochist's job, and the amount of responsibility that it brings to you will certainly turn you into the masochist you need to be.

When reading around about business and such, you may come across some thing that says "90% of businesses fail in the first 5 years", or something to that effect. Without additional context, a statement like that is really discouraging and not very helpful to anyone. I think there's a lot of truth the statement, but how many jobs have you had that lasted 5 full years without you leaving because you went for greener pastures, you needed to move, you got fired, etc? With that in mind, 90% of all work probably fails/ends in some manner in the first 5 years.

This brings me into the news I must break about the companies I co-own. Happy Camper Studios and Rising Tide Software are ships that can no longer remain afloat. You might blame the economy. You might blame various political administrations. You might blame mismanagement. I can't rest fault on any single factor, although I have some ideas on what would have really helped, and what I would do differently given the chance. As a disclaimer, all of the principles of the companies are on good terms with each other, and there will be no finger pointing here.

If you're a partner in a business, you need to have a hand in the finances. Taking on the role of accountant during the final hours of the businesses was a daunting task to add onto my growing list of other tasks. It also leaves you in a position to better assess risk to the business and your own personal finances. If you cannot be involved in the finances directly, then you are not truly a partner. Even investors get to see the financial status of their investments.

Can you really trust people with their hand in the pot like that? Probably not. You don't want to get in the blame game for who expensed what against the business, and whether or not that was a good idea. Among other things, you can get into problems about control, responsibility, and then you have people you can't easily fire (or threaten to fire) when they are out of line or aren't pulling their weight. As many people have advised me (and myself advising others), I'd say don't ever get partners. I'm referring to business partners. I think partnerships are fine on a per-job or task basis. In other words, if I partner up with a school teacher because I want to make educational games, that might be a good idea, but I don't want that partnership extending out into my primary source of income, or into my other business ventures. Before I move on, let's be clear that I have no angst towards my particular partners I had during the lifetime of the business. I've simply yet to see partnerships work out great for any business that I've seen thus far.

Without a marketing-money pipeline, your business is an accident, not a a business. For the longest time, our business thrived off of word of mouth. It's like trees that live off of rainfall. That's great if there's lots of rain, but in the real word, the weather waxes and wanes. Your business needs to be able to control the rate at which it aquires work and turns said work into money. I've heard programmers joke about how they are a machine which turns caffine into code. An image comes to mind of pouring coffee, the dark poison, into a funnel. The contraption that the funnel is connected to coughs and sputters, and then vomits out the code. Your business must be such a contraption. A certain mixture of time and money in the form of marketting is poured into your machine (the business), and the business turns that into more money. There must be some reasonable expectation of how much time and money you must put into the business, and how much money that turns out to be. Without such a formula, your business will wilt once the accidental work dries up.

Packing up the office and dividing who gets the pens and puffing the last of our fat capitalist cigars is a somewhat sad moment. At some point I may try a business out again, but only after getting a lot of my debts squared off and a large savings is built up. At that point, a business might just be a monetary investment to me more so than a place for me to spend all of my time.

Until then, I'm going to rejoin the work force as programmer. I'd like to stay away from risk for a while and go back to just trying to enjoy things, and work myself out of the idea that work and enjoyment are exclusive things. I've got a real family now, and that moves your priorities around a bit.

It'll be nice to do some production Rails work (which I'm applying for). I think any Ruby developer should know Rails, and does himself a disservice by not being at least familiar with it. The Ruby community knows Rails, and Rails, in many ways, is production Ruby. I'm not saying Rails is always the right choice (I'm still going to maintain Monkeybars, and keep using it), but these tools are the some of the reasons that make Ruby so awesome as both a language and a development environment. If you're in fast-food, you want to be able to make fries AND burgers.